I try not to think about it constantly. But, it bothers me often. It's the main reason I left the prosecutor's office years ago. There's a difference in acuteness between this massacre that happened out of the blue, and the ongoing misfortune of lives being ended too soon by the causes that have become well known to us.

And we can be done. You don't have any interest in how I feel about this, you're just being a dick. Enjoy that.

The Muthaship:StoPPeRmobile: So, it bothers you every minute of every day?

I try not to think about it constantly. But, it bothers me often. It's the main reason I left the prosecutor's office years ago. There's a difference in acuteness between this massacre that happened out of the blue, and the ongoing misfortune of lives being ended too soon by the causes that have become well known to us.

And we can be done. You don't have any interest in how I feel about this, you're just being a dick. Enjoy that.

Gulper Eel:tetsoushima: I live in Danbury, I know a couple of the people that died. It's not just that the reporters are there trying to get a story, it's that they are extremely aggressive towards grieving families and townspeople. The more stories I'm hearing from friends, the more I just want to take a short drive and do something immature. Can you say "cock" on the air?

Work it in subtly - chances are some yutz will miss it in the editing process.

There's also the time-honored practice of giving them your name as Heywood Jablome. If you pronounce the name to them as HA-blo-mee they'll never catch it.

If it works you have to submit it to Fark, of course.

Honestly, I'm probably just going to stay out of Sandy Hook because the families have enough to deal with without another person driving around in their town.

/To clarify, Sandy Hook used to be a small village down the road from Newtown, but was eventually incorporated when Newtown grew.//Also, Newtown is pronounced New town, not Newton.///My newest pet peeves.

The Muthaship:had98c: They have accountability to their superiors to get the news story by any means necessary. That's their job. They don't get paid to be decent.

I wonder what kind of person a job like that attracts?

I used to be a reporter and most of us became reporters because we wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein. I was able to do some real investigative reporting for a few months and it was the best. Interesting, exciting...seeing the story that revealed the dirty tricks, the lying pricks, it's an amazing feeling. And you're actually doing good.

But notice that I said I was able to do it "for a few months." Real investigative reporting takes time and money and there are very few organizations willing to put in the time or money.

What happened in Newton is news so obviously reporters are going to go there to cover the story. The print reporters will go about doing their jobs quietly and methodically and they're the ones who will get good information and in-depth information. It's the TV reporters who are so obnoxious while doing no actual reporting. To be fair, they need visuals but they don't need to be in front of the church during a funeral. But they feel they have to be there because everybody else is there. And nobody is going to watch a reporter standing in front of an empty church describing what it was like earlier when they can watch actual people going to a funeral on another station.

You can call reporters vultures but they're just feeding the vultures. They wouldn't be doing it, they wouldn't show it if people weren't watching. I'm a news junkie but I don't want to see these people going to funerals. And I don't see that as news.

My interest in the story at this point is along the lines of learning about the shooter, why he did it, how we get people like that and what will actually help prevent it from happening again.

I don't want to hear about the funerals. I don't want to read/hear little portraits of the children who were killed, what they liked and what they wanted to be when they grew up. And I don't understand people who want to see and read that, it seems to me that they're just feeding off the pain. Or maybe they want to feel happy/relieved that it's not them.

As for interviewing those affected, many people WANT to talk about it. No one is forced to talk about it. Reporters jumping in front of people trying to start an interview without asking, with the camera already rolling, then showing that on the air are just obnoxious and they're doing it wrong. You're supposed to ask the person of he wants to answer a few questions, then turn the camera on and conduct the interview. And do it in a sensitive, calm manner. "Reporters" who do that ambush thing are always frustrated that some other reporter got a good interview and honestly wonder why they can't get the good interviews and why no one will talk to them. And they blame everyone and everything else, never considering that it might be their style and approach.

As I said, I'm a news junkie but I almost never watch television news because it's just so bad. I read my news.

I know the behavior of TV news people is awful in this sort of situation but you really don't want restrictions on the media. That's done by people with something to hide, like BP hiring private security to "close" the beaches and chase reporters away after the oil spill. A free press is one of the things that makes democracy work. There are a lot of reporters risking their lives to get the story and a lot of reporters who have been arrested, tortured and killed just for doing their jobs.

Al jazeera breaks news because they're the only news organization in the Arab world that isn't government controlled. There's a reason why the first thing you do after overthrowing a government is seize control of the media.

Phins:The Muthaship: had98c: They have accountability to their superiors to get the news story by any means necessary. That's their job. They don't get paid to be decent.

I wonder what kind of person a job like that attracts?

I used to be a reporter and most of us became reporters because we wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein. I was able to do some real investigative reporting for a few months and it was the best. Interesting, exciting...seeing the story that revealed the dirty tricks, the lying pricks, it's an amazing feeling. And you're actually doing good.

But notice that I said I was able to do it "for a few months." Real investigative reporting takes time and money and there are very few organizations willing to put in the time or money.

What happened in Newton is news so obviously reporters are going to go there to cover the story. The print reporters will go about doing their jobs quietly and methodically and they're the ones who will get good information and in-depth information. It's the TV reporters who are so obnoxious while doing no actual reporting. To be fair, they need visuals but they don't need to be in front of the church during a funeral. But they feel they have to be there because everybody else is there. And nobody is going to watch a reporter standing in front of an empty church describing what it was like earlier when they can watch actual people going to a funeral on another station.

You can call reporters vultures but they're just feeding the vultures. They wouldn't be doing it, they wouldn't show it if people weren't watching. I'm a news junkie but I don't want to see these people going to funerals. And I don't see that as news.

My interest in the story at this point is along the lines of learning about the shooter, why he did it, how we get people like that and what will actually help prevent it from happening again.

I don't want to hear about the funerals. I don't want to read/hear little portraits of the children who were killed, what ...

And it's so weird, because no one other than the media wants to talk about it. ER's in major cities are overtaxed because of all the broken wrists from people changing the channel so quickly. No one on the internet wants to post a single word about it. I don't understand how these media outlets stay in business when their ratings are absolutely bottoming out every time something like this happens.

It was the tragedy du jour. It was the main, if not the only thing, on the RSS feeds for a couple of days. The rest of the world was still there doing things. Syria was still war-torn with more casualties each day than in Newtown. We still have troops on active duty in Afghanistan. But, everything was eclipsed by the supernova in Connecticut. It's always like that when something out of the ordinary happens. It's hard to find news about anything else. News on Afghanistan has been sporadic lately, anyway. It seemed to me that some of the news people saw this as the opportunity they had been waiting for to press the case for gun control, and they weren't going to let it get away. I had the same problem with the election. Some news peoples' views were too apparent. I view it as unreporterly. A reporter should leave his or her personal views at home. I just want the news. Any editorial content should be thoroughly labeled as such. I can think it through for myself.